Penelope Lemon

by Inman Majors

  “No idea,” said Penelope.

  “You’ve got to be curious though, right?” Rachel said.

  “I don’t know. I guess. I suppose it’s only natural to be a little curious about who your ex has taken up with. I’m not going to get all hung up on it, though.”

  Sandy looked at Rachel and said: “Seriously, who in the hell would date James?”

  “All I know is that she must be a doozy,” said Penelope. “He offered me a hundred bucks today.”

  Both friends reacted strongly to this. James’s skinflint ways were known far and wide.

  “He’s berobed!” said Sandy.

  Rachel nodded, saying, “He’s found himself a cowgirl.”

  “No doubt,” said Penelope.

  “You took the money, I hope,” said Sandy.

  “No way.”

  Sandy looked at Rachel and said: “Her mopey ex-husband screws her over in the divorce, and she won’t take a hundred dollars when he offers? This is the same guy who used to time her showers. Unreal.”

  She turned to Penelope now and said: “He’s living in a brand new house, despite his claims to being broke, so either he hid money from you and your worst-ever lawyer during the arbitration, or he’s won the lottery, or his parents—who are rich, by the way—are helping him out. And you’re living with your mother. Give me a break. Take the stinking money.”

  “I’m not taking his money,” she said, “just because he feels guilty. I don’t need it that bad.”

  “Yes you do,” said Rachel.

  “A hundred dollars wouldn’t change anything,” Penelope said. “Why bother?”

  “She’s not even mad at Mopey Boy,” said Sandy, again addressing Rachel.

  “You know her,” said Rachel. “She never gets mad. Or not for long. And she can’t hold a grudge at all. It’s just not in her makeup.”

  “Well, it drives me crazy,” Sandy said, throwing back the last of her wine and reaching aggressively for the bottle, which they were no longer even pretending to keep refrigerated.

  “I’m sitting right here, you know,” said Penelope.

  Rachel smiled. “You can’t help it, can you, honey? You just don’t have a temper.”

  “Seriously, what’s wrong with you?” said Sandy.

  “I don’t know,” Penelope said. “I had a teacher in second grade who called my mom because I smiled all day in class and it was freaking her out. I didn’t even know I was doing it. I’ve just always been kind of laid-back, I guess.”

  As her friends continued to talk about her temperament and laissez-faire approach to the vagaries of life, Penelope thought now was as good a time as any to head to the bathroom.

  When she returned to the table, her friends were on several simultaneous topics. The need for Penelope to find her own place. The need for Penelope to find a half-decent job. The need, the apparent urgent need, for Penelope to spend time alone without the company of a man.

  “When was the last time you didn’t have a man in your life?” Rachel asked.

  “You mean besides now?”

  “Yes, besides these last four months.”

  Penelope swirled the wine in her glass and considered. She’d taken up with the huge huge redneck (the HHR) her senior year in high school and had married him, in true redneck style, before she even graduated college, so hot was their passion for cohabitation and takeout pizza and arguing over how many largemouth bass he could mount on the wall.

  But there had been a lot of boyfriends before the HHR.

  “I don’t know,” said Penelope. “Maybe third grade.”

  “What?!” Sandy shouted. “So you had a boyfriend in fourth grade, and from then on you haven’t been without?”

  “Fourth grade wasn’t really a boyfriend,” said Penelope, smiling at the memory. “My friend Debbie and I would chase these two boys home from the bus after school. And about every other time, they’d trip on purpose so we could catch them. Then we’d hop on their chests, wrestle a bit, then end up kissing them.”

  “That sounds like assault,” said Sandy.

  “I told you. They tripped on purpose. We never could have caught them otherwise. Tim Newton was the fastest kid in the class. Eventually I’d let him flip me over and he’d yell I’m too hot to handle and too cold to hold! and take off running.”

  “What?” said Sandy.

  “It’s Macho Man Randy Savage,” said Penelope. “All the boys loved him.”

  “Macho who, macho what?” said Sandy.

  “The Macho Man,” said Penelope, trying to jog Sandy’s memory. “The tower of power, too sweet to be sour, ohhh yeah!”

  Rachel nodded. She knew the reference. Sandy’s upbringing in New Jersey had obviously been vastly different from the southern gals at the table.

  “He was a pro wrestler,” said Penelope. “But for the record, I was a better wrestler than Timmy Newton. If I’d wanted to, I could have held him down and smooched the day away. He was kind of shrimpy. Fast but shrimpy.”

  Sandy and Rachel exchanged looks, amused that Penelope was proud of her grappling ability. But now that she thought of it, maybe she could teach Theo some moves. Next time one of those mean kids called him Weird Turd, he could get a little of his own with a casual sleeper hold. Perhaps an old-school suplex. That might make those smarties reconsider a nickname or two.

  “Seriously, I was a good wrestler.”

  “We believe you,” said Rachel. “But what about your friend Debbie?”

  “Oh, Debbie. She wasn’t much of a wrestler.”

  This made Sandy and Rachel laugh really hard. Penelope took a sip of wine and let them. Fourth grade had been a really good year.

  They eventually calmed themselves, and Penelope could see Sandy trying to stiffen her face after the laughing jag. She was suddenly all knowing head shakes as Penelope recounted her afternoon at baseball practice with Missy, the smutty book–reading mom.

  “I’m just suggesting,” said Sandy in a weary tone, “that you’re in a vulnerable spot right now. And that when you’re like this, when you’re feeling at loose ends, you seem to attract kooky people. Just an observation I’ve made.”

  “Well I’ve got to have someone to hang out with,” said Penelope. “And now you’re saying this new gal is out because she’s reading the exact same book you guys did. You know, y’all want me to spend time alone, without a man, but that gets old after a while. And you two aren’t available that much. You have husbands. And kids. What do you suggest I do when I’m by myself on the weekend at my mom’s house?”

  “We thought you’d just read raunchy books 24/7,” said Rachel, smiling. She was looking at Penelope as if afraid she might cry.

  “That doesn’t make you want to avoid men,” said Penelope. “The exact opposite, in fact.”

  Both friends were smiling at her and Penelope realized she’d made them feel bad. A pep talk ensued. Penelope nodded at appropriate times but stopped listening almost immediately. She was sure it followed the standard script, which went as follows:

  1) Warn Penelope off of men.

  2) Suggest a hobby or something enriching that she could do alone or with other sober-minded women. Knitting/scrapbooking/quilting—all that old lady stuff.

  3) Suggest jobs better than the one she had.

  4) Adamantly suggest how much better she’d feel once she had her own place.

  5) Remind her that she was only two years away from a college degree and offer a few updates on distance-learning.

  6) General suggestions for mental, physical, and spiritual well-being, including biographies of various Tibetans and assorted shamans, and also The Kite Runner.

  7) Another, mercifully shorter, spiel about the joy of macramé.

  Finished, her friends smiled warmly at her, glad she wouldn’t be reduced to tears by her own sad existence, an existence, frankly, that she didn’t find quite as depressing as they did. Her mother had reminded her at nearly every meal about the starving children in India, and it was of
them she thought when feeling glum about her nominally middle-class life, as she was now—just a little—thanks to this rousing pep talk from her friends.

  6

  Penelope pulled up to her mother’s brick rancher, hoping against hope for an empty house, but both cars and George’s old pickup were parked comfortably—smugly even—in the driveway. She was SOL. Why couldn’t the senior citizen dance be every Friday instead of just twice a month? Better yet, why couldn’t they take two-stepping or canasta lessons every single night of the week? Didn’t seniors need to stimulate themselves via museum trips and group jigsaw puzzles or risk brains turning to gruel? Shouldn’t they be performing weight-bearing exercises well into the night?

  She visualized the house she was walking into: George, her stepfather since she was twelve, would be in his recliner watching the Western Channel at ear-blasting level, the six-shooters banging this way and that amid the heavy tread of a stampede. Next to him, on the loveseat, her mother talking over the gunfire and whooping Indians to her friend Bernadette about the cesspool of intrigue that was the Hillsboro Garden Club.

  In short, a cacophony of gunfire and subpar coneflowers, dance hall pianos, and the need for fresh fund-raising ideas.

  Man, she needed her own place.

  She grabbed the two bags of groceries she’d bought on the way back from Sandy’s, meanwhile tallying her checking account and average weekly earnings at Coonskins Frontier Steak House. How much would she need before committing to an apartment? One thousand? Two? She continued her intricate and hopeful calculus as she came up the front walk. By the time she stepped into the carport, she understood that after health care and car insurance payments, she would be able to move out at the earliest possible date of:

  NEVER.

  And that wasn’t even counting the oil light in her car that had been a steady nagging yellow for a week now, the engine suffering from some jungle fever, some mysterious mechanical bile. She had no idea. Damn James and his cheap-ass ways. Damn her early redneck marriage. She should have a regular career by now. Waiting tables at forty—what the hell? At the very least, she should have kept working at Doctor Kirby’s office after she got married. The pay wasn’t great but at least she’d have benefits now. Yes, she enjoyed being home with Theo when he was little, but she could have gone back to work once he started school. Or gone back to finish her degree. James hadn’t encouraged either, the opposite in fact, but who cared what he thought? She’d just gotten too complacent, too sure the life she had in the suburbs was the life she’d always have.

  Her mother and George were nowhere in sight when she came into the kitchen, though she could hear their bedroom blaring. Yes, George was surely riding the open range at this very moment. And if she listened closely, she’d hear her mother on the phone with Bernadette, plotting a tulip bulb coup against the wildflower freaks in the garden club.

  Typical old-married-people stuff.

  Feeling not in the least old or married, and not particularly hungry, she unloaded her groceries and snuck down the stairs to the basement. It was time for a little investigative reporting to see if she might discover the mystery woman who’d put her ex in such a jolly, generous mood.

  She settled into the smaller of the two downstairs bedrooms, which George had converted into his office. Theo preferred to sleep upstairs because the basement aggravated his asthma. Asthma, my God. Was there a single white-person ailment Theo didn’t have? Of course James had them all too: allergies, asthma, motion sickness, tight hamstrings, nearsightedness, burned skin in the summer and a flaky scalp all winter long. James, who loved all things evolutionary, claimed he’d have no physical problems at all if he’d never been moved from the Scottish bog of his forefathers. But weren’t bogs wet and damp? Wouldn’t that environment—the mold specifically—trigger asthma, allergies, and a host of other snotty things that usually left him bedridden and crying out for the Nyquil?

  Scottish bog, her ass.

  While she waited for the computer to boot up, she took in George’s cute little man cave. In the corner, the assortment of walking sticks that he fashioned in the carport. On a far shelf, his medley of hats: darling plaid tams that he’d purchased on a trip to England, the lucky bowler he wore to poker games at Judge Wyatt’s, and finally his favorite, the sturdy dust-colored (of course!) cowboy hat he broke out in the fall whenever he was going to build a fire. Maps of colonial Virginia and books on American wars and founding fathers completed the quintessential old-man refuge, cozy as a wool cardigan. Good old George. What a sweetie.

  The computer had finally come on, so she quickly clicked on the browser. Unfortunately, thoughts of Scottish bogs reminded her of James’s family coat of arms—the one with the swords and the apples and the lion—that he’d insisted on hanging in their den. She was brooding about having to look at that thing every time she wanted to watch TV when a pop-up appeared. This wasn’t uncommon, as George’s computer was powered by small mice racing on a wheel under the desk. She was lost in a Scottish daze, wondering if those really were apples in the coat of arms or some fruit/vegetable native to the moor, and paid no heed to the pop-up. It was either an advertisement for gold buying in the coming financial meltdown or salves to soothe George’s aching joints.

  The motto on James’s family crest is as follows: Ictus Leonis Et Non Pet, which translated to: Neither Stroke Nor Pet The Lion. She didn’t miss that coat of arms.

  And now she didn’t miss the pop-up either. There, inches from her face, was a woman, nude save for black stockings and super-high heels, with the biggest breasts she’d ever seen. The woman was winking and holding a finger to her mouth, indicating that whatever Penelope decided to do with her naked buxom image would be their little secret. She’d never tell. The banner above her head read Boobie Bungalow and offered unlimited access to films and jpegs of the highest ppi for only $7.99 a month, with the first month offered free of charge and without further obligation.

  Penelope contemplated those boobs. They were artificial, of course, now that she looked at them closely. And bigger than the average pumpkin picked for a Halloween jack-o-lantern.

  How in the name of God could the poor woman even walk on those two skinny stockinged legs of hers? You’d think the heels would just flatten like pancakes under mammary overload. The breasts didn’t seem physically possible, even with the aid of modern science. Did they just keep filling the implant up like kids with a water balloon on the hose, giggling and daring to see how full they could get it? Were they going for a world’s record?

  It occurred to her that pop-ups of this sort didn’t happen out of the blue. Read some article about a return to the gold standard and up popped advertisements for end-of-times investing. Do a search for naked women with giant ta-tas and what was likely to pop up was ye olde Boobie Bungalow.

  But George? Sweet little George with his plaid tam and his Hush Puppy shoes? Patriotic George with his fighter plane models? As she contemplated the source of unwanted computer advertisements, the phrase pop-up took on a new, sad, and gross meaning. Did her mother know that George still had urges, that his was a lion that wanted to be stroked and petted by clans of absurdly buxom bimbos?

  Whatever. It was his office, he could do what he wanted. Her mother wouldn’t know or wouldn’t care, so busy was she preparing for the garden club fund-raiser. Penelope could practically hear the envelopes being licked and stuffed from here. Nodding at the Middle American familiarity of this, she clicked the naked woman of the aching back off the screen and raced to James’s Facebook page. She planned on being thorough in her cyber-snooping and discovering how it came to be that he was dating and living in a nice new place and humming the theme from Shaft when she was in her mother’s basement, alone, on a Friday night.

  She started with the ABOUT section:

  Chief Financial Officer at IndiCo.

  I.e.: accountant.

  Studied business and history at The University of North Carolina.

  Majored in looking s
erious while in cowboy boots and holding a shotgun (see timeline).

  Lives in Hillsboro, Virginia.

  In a cute little dollhouse. Without his parents. Unlike his kind and lovely ex-wife.

  From Asheville, North Carolina.

  God is a Tarheel. Sky is Carolina blue. Look Homeward, Tarheel. Tarheel arts and Tarheel crafts. Tarheel this and Tarheel that.

  In a relationship with A Very Special Lady.

  Gross her out the door. Seriously. Right out the door.

  But who was this enigmatic vixen? Penelope was just moving to James’s Likes—he was notorious for updating those in tune with his mood and how his day had gone—when up popped another big-breasted lass. Under a banner proclaiming MMM: Melon MILF Mélange stood a topless middle-aged woman with two actual cantaloupes in each hand. She seemed by the pose to be indicating how paltry melons grown from the good Earth were compared to her own. Penelope looked closer. This woman was also in heels and stockings, though hers were red whereas Boobie Bungalow’s were black. Another difference was that these boobs looked real, amazing as that was. She wished now that she could go back to the Bungalow picture to compare. Her money was still on the artificially enhanced woman, but her heart was pulling for the lady before her, choosing the nature over science side of the debate as was only proper.

  Regardless, George was a horny dog. While her mother was busy with garden club mailings, George was eyeing the History Channel with unbridled lust in his heart. The Battle of the Bulge indeed.

  But now it was time to get back to her search for the Very Special Lady in her ex-husband’s life. She was prepared to spend the whole evening investigating and was glad to have a purpose. Friday night TV really was the worst. So, bidding a somewhat fond and admiring adieu to MMM and the mysterious bounties of nature, she returned to her mission.

  His FRIENDS and PHOTOS were unchanged since she’d checked last week, so she moved down to PLACES. She thought this was likely a waste of time even as she did it, for James had his go-to locales which rarely changed: